A Confession About Reading

I find myself feeling a bit stuffy in my middle years, puffing up about the way some in the current generation seem to study great literature by the light of YouTube, while texting, watching DVDs and googling.

I tell myself, despairing somewhat, that as a child, I read Little Women and was given the gift by Miss Alcott of creating the March family out of imagination -- and that now, whatever visions a girl might have of Jo have been supplanted by Winona Ryder.  If you ask someone today if they’ve read Atonement, they might cheerfully tell you, yes, they saw the movie. 

But before I get too righteous in my indignation, out with the confession.  And an unflinching look at my own high school study habits. 

When I was in my formative years, the literary hue and cry was about Cliffs Notes.   Just in case you’ve not seen them, these are small yellow-and-black booklets which summarize and condense the plot, characters, and spirit of books -- many of them classics -- into bite-sized, manageable ideas.  I’m ashamed to say that my fellow students and I used them liberally when English class report deadlines loomed. 

It was possible to read Hawthorne’s 750-page The Scarlet Letter in an evening, through the 128-page, large-type, easy-to-digest summary of the chapters.  This allowed us that extra night on the weekend to drink at the beach with friends, or to take the drive up the Pacific Coast Highway with eight-track tapes blaring, or perhaps to spend an afternoon doing next to nothing and moaning about it.

Then, Sunday night would bring the frantic scanning of the trusty Cliffs Notes booklet, with its eloquent opinions already formed, its syntax in perfect order, and its insight into the motivations and symbolism of Hester Prynne’s shame already canned, sterile, and ready to put to the page.  I never plagiarized, mind you, but my thoughts were decidedly bent in the same direction as the person who wrote that little summary.  

So you can see, I really have nothing to be judgmental about.  I suppose I could grasp at straws and say that the visual nature of films, television and video clips tend to shortcut all imagination, even down to hair color and tone of voice –- whereas the Notes still allowed us to create the characters in our minds, but really, I don’t have a leg to stand on.  I’ll simply put myself in the town square, as Hester did, and wear the truth on my frock.

I didn’t read The Scarlet Letter in its entirety in high school, but I did in college.   And I’ve re-read it since.  It changes as my view of the world changes -- as it will for the ones now watching Demi Moore and Gary Oldman play out the story in Roland Joffe’s 1995 version of what he thinks the story means.

What I know, above all else, is that great books endure.  They sit patiently on the shelf until we’re ready to take in what they have to offer.   

They have all the time in the world.

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